Exclusive: Mike Zullo Responds to Buzzfeed Editor on Obama Birth Certificate

“THEY CAN’T REFUTE THE FINDINGS”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jan. 26, 2017) — As The Post & Email reported, on Wednesday evening Buzzfeed Editor Ben Smith was Tucker Carlson’s first guest at 9:00 PM EST in a discussion about decisions made by news desks as to whether or not to publish unsubstantiated information and unverified documents placed in their hands.

[Editor’s Note: Buzzfeed publishes profanity which many will find offensive.]

Buzzfeed has been the beneficiary of a $200 million investment by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News, CNBC, and MSNBC.  At the same time, the new media initiative launched by former writers at The Washington Post, Vox, also received an infusion of financial support from NBCU.  All are left-leaning outlets.

The interview began cordially, with Smith thanking Carlson for inviting him on the show to “make his case” to Carlson’s viewers.

Smith told Carlson that “there are reasonable arguments” to release “unverified” documents to allow members of the public to make up their own minds about their veracity.

Carlson proffered that allegations made by Larry Sinclair, who at first he did not name, in 2008 of “creepy and illegal things” committed by Sinclair and then-presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama were not disseminated by Fox News because they were unsubstantiated.  Carlson acknowledged, however, that Sinclair had reportedly completed a “sworn statement” for law enforcement about the alleged incidents.

In the case of Sinclair, Smith recalled reporting the allegations but said he had warned his audience that they were likely “totally insane.”

The Post & Email was unable to find a posting by Buzzfeed on the subject.

Smith then compared the Sinclair allegations to what he referred to as the “Muslim” and “Obama birth certificate” issues without clarifying further, although Carlson appeared to understand the references without the need for an explanation.

Mainstream media have pushed back against many Americans’ perception that Obama is a Muslim and not a Christian, as he claims.

In another example, Smith said Buzzfeed did not “clip” it out when Trump “started talking about the birth certificate,” which he suggested other media believed was “nonsense.”

Buzzfeed characterized Trump’s questioning of Obama’s lack of documentation as having morphed into “lies” and a “conspiracy theory,” not unlike the mainstream press.

Early in 2011, Trump had called upon the White House to release Obama’s detailed birth certificate to presumably show that he was born in Hawaii and therefore qualified for the presidency as a “natural born Citizen” Amidst reports that he was born in a foreign country such as Kenya or Indonesia. At that time, the only “proof” released to the public that Obama was born anywhere in the United States was a “short-form” Certification of Life Birth supplied by an unnamed party and denounced as a forgery almost immediately.

Trump had appeared on a number of news outlets repeating his demand for Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate, which the White House eventually released on April 27, 2011 to much fanfare.

Despite a number of experts declaring the image fraudulent, the mainstream media has labored intensively to convince the public that the “conspiracy theories” surrounding Obama’s birthplace, background and birth certificate are “debunked.”

Like every other media outlet, neither Buzzfeed, NBC, or Fox News has reported on the revelations made during a December 15, 2016 press conference held by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), then led by Joseph Arpaio, and his lead investigator, Mike Zullo, who conducted a five-year probe into the birth certificate image.

In that third and final press conference, in conjunction with a video produced for the event, Zullo explained that two well-respected forensics analysts in different parts of the world working independently arrived at the same conclusion based on nine identified points of forgery: that the long-form birth certificate image posted at whitehouse.gov bearing Obama’s name cannot possibly be authentic.

One of the analysts, Reed Hayes, resides in Hawaii and voted for Obama twice.

On January 2, Fox News’s Bret Baier referenced (22:26) the birth certificate investigation by first erroneously referring to Arpaio as the “Metro Phoenix” rather than “Maricopa County” sheriff. He said that Arpaio was “off the job tonight” and “left his job after 24 years” before eventually clarifying at the end of his report that Arpaio had lost re-election on November 8.

Without mentioning the December 15 press conference, Baier acknowledged Arpaio’s “five-year investigation” into Obama’s birth certificate “which Arpaio’s investigative team still insists is not real.”

Baier then claimed that the White House and Obama had responded to the claims of forgery by stating that the findings are “ridiculous,” although there is no record of any such response by the previous administration.  Rather, During Obama’s final week in office, Press Secretary Josh Earnest claimed that the birth certificate image proved “that the charges against the president — that were lobbed against the president — were false.”

Arpaio promised to provide federal authorities and Congress with the totality of evidence from the investigation before he left office on December 31.

On Thursday, Zullo told The Post & Email, “Strikingly, in every news report, they do not address the newly-released findings verified by two forensic disciplines.  In doing so, they avoid bringing attention and credibility to the issue. They can’t refute the findings, but they still want to put the propaganda out there as if it were some kind of conspiracy theory.  But the press conferences have not been debunked.

“Even in a manufactured crisis such as what they did with the release of the Russian ‘dossier,’ they are still spewing propaganda to put in the public’s mind that there’s no merit to the birth certificate claim. They’re using that as a vehicle again to place in your mind that it’s a crazy idea. They’re using this crisis to further another cause.  They are pronouncing that birth certificate good without doing any research.”